Abstract 48: Design for Design (ACCEPTED)

Design Research
Today when the term design is frequently used in different contexts design research tackles with the discipline’s core competences and propulsions. It searches for future chances to incorporate those into the value-added process. We think that in a research project design is an active process, shaped by the examination of and the cooperation with other areas of expertise.
The goal: the prospective integration of design competences in different topics. Our most important achievements are cognitions about the “social development” of cooperation and the best practices in the design phase.

An open Discipline and its Chances
Design can be called an open discipline that cannot refer to an own scientific background but depends on the close collaboration with other specialisms. Conceptual solutions can only unveil their full impact while design opens up to transdisciplinary work. That’s the way how design competences can be introduced as innovation’s driving power. If designers only deal with their discipline’s tasks they gamble away their future chances.
Design is an innovation driver that works basically user-centred. We pose the question: How can design manage that challenge or become more consistent with it in future?
We all know: the earlier designers become integrated in interdisciplinary development teams the better are chances for design aspects to be considered in the project. At what point shall design join in the idea process? We demand: very early. Design mustn’t stay the product developments “ultimate resort“, that’s clear, but has to influence it right from the start. In order to lay the groundwork for user-centred developments in time the design process has to be kicked off even before the actual developing process starts. Therefore: should design shape the (product-) designer’s framework to-be?
To move off the beaten tracks and to seize the chance to establish their (working) methods in various projects becomes more and more important for designers. In doing so it might be experienced where design approaches its limits. But the cases in which design explores unexpected views on problems are yet to be discovered. It’s desirable for us that the project owners learn in which processes designers are able to contribute or even in which cases they might be able to help while other specialists cannot present satisfying solutions. Such an experience at the best will lead to mutual respect and trust between project owners and designers and therefore provides a basis for ongoing co-operations.

Reality and good Concepts
Design and its solutions have to be reconciled continuously with reality to be accepted. However that doesn’t mean that they aren’t allowed to dare foresight or to introduce extraordinary ideas. In fact that means that the ideas’ origin has to be comprehensible and can be easily explained to outsiders. A designer’s advertency will increase automatically towards his project’s topic. He will evaluate new developments and users and synchronise his concepts with the changed influencing constants even after the projects conclusion. A design project doesn’t really come to an end…

Design and the Knowledge Society
The alteration from an industrial- into a knowledge society is fascinating to observe and will definitely have an effect on our discipline, too. Which tasks will a designer have to handle in an increasing knowledge- and service-based society? Will he have to simplify and thereby explain the complexity of an increasingly manifold environment? There’s no doubt about the future necessity of organising the access to knowledge.

The Appliance of Design Methods in a Project
“Die Praxisreform“ is a design research project that deals with the German health care system. It has been developed by an interdisciplinary team (two designers and two GPs). The German health care system is experiencing its change as it is deregulating itself. As a result a new health care market will come into being that will have to be tapped from a designer’s point of view. It was the project’s first important step to understand the extensive health care system, at least in proposals. That’s how we got a knowledge base to communicate with the GPs and to develop ideas and concepts. To configure a new business model that connects GPs into a chain of surgeries that operates under a common brand name was the project’s objective and an eminent challenge for both, the designers and the GPs. Therefore they met as equal partners in the project and developed the new health care solution in a team right from the beginning.
We assume that designers will not have to generate concepts out of cumbrously acquired expert knowledge in future. They will rather have to put together adequate interdisciplinary project teams and to sensitise them to the project’s theme while focussing the user’s sight, particularly as projects become more and more complex. The designer moderates the group’s ideas generation and afterwards combines the design fragments to an applicable solution.
That might be a designer’s work in future.